There was a time when I thought Leonard Cohen might be a joke I was not in on. I did not dislike him exactly. I simply did not understand him. His voice seemed too low and plain for singing, but too carefully measured to be a spoken word performance. The songs rarely moved toward the choruses I expected, nor did they tell me what to feel and when. They sounded religious without being devotional, erotic without being explicit. I could not tell whether I was supposed to laugh, repent, or light a cigarette.
“First We Take Manhattan” was my first encounter with him, and it baffled me. It sounded less like a song than a threat set to a cheap electronic beat. The synthesizers seemed dated and almost silly. Cohen delivered the words in the same low, controlled voice, as though he were describing events whose outcome had already been decided. Something ominous was happening, but the song was also faintly absurd. I wanted to laugh, though I suspected that laughter meant I was missing the point.
Left alone with a streaming app, I would have skipped it.
The skip would have recorded something real. At that moment, I was not interested in the song. A recommendation system would not have been wrong to notice. It might have sent me toward a softer ballad or a smoother voice, something melancholy in a form I already understood. Cohen would not necessarily have disappeared forever, but he would have become less likely to return.
The trouble is that my first thought was not yet the truth. I had not discovered that I disliked Leonard Cohen. I had discovered that I did not yet know how to hear him. A system could record that I skipped the song or clicked the little heart beside it. It could not know whether I moved on because the song was wrong for me or because I hadn’t had enough time with it yet. It could not determine whether I was being judicious or impatient.
I kept listening because other people kept putting Cohen back on.
I remember a college evening in a friend’s kitchen after dinner. The plates were still on the table when someone put on Cohen. No one else seemed to find the choice strange. I made a dismissive remark about the voice or the production. My friend did not defend Cohen’s place in the canon or make an appeal about the quality of his lyrics. What he said amounted to: “No, listen.”
The same thing happened elsewhere. Friends played Cohen in their cars. Writers I admired mentioned him as though no explanation were necessary. His songs continue to float around me long enough for my initial response to lose its authority.
At some point, I stopped wishing the voice were different. What had sounded affected began to sound authentic. The joke was not separate from the sadness but one of the ways Cohen bore it. The song remained strange, but I had begun to understand what its strangeness was doing.
Nietzsche has a passage for this in The Gay Science. “One must learn to love,” he writes, and he begins with music:
First one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a separate life; then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity.
A song may be heard before it becomes intelligible. We may hear the notes and still not hear the music. Nietzsche is interested in that interval, the awkward period when something has not yet become beautiful to us but has not quite left us alone. Only later does the change come:
Finally there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we wait for it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing: and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.
What begins as an account of music becomes a larger claim about love. We often speak about taste as though it were already a finished product inside us. We imagine moving through the world and recognizing whatever fits the person we really are, deep down. Nietzsche offers a more demanding account. Sometimes the things one encounters change the person doing the choosing. We learn how to perceive it, and in learning, become capable of a love that was not available to us at first.
I first encountered that passage in college. Years later, my wife and I had it read at our wedding. During the ceremony, hearing the words spoken aloud rather than encountering them alone on a page, I understood them as a description of what we were promising.
We had chosen one another, but we had not finished learning what that choice would mean. A wedding does not mean that two people have completed the work of loving each other. The person beside you will change. So will you. Our vows acknowledged that neither of us had exhausted what there was to know in the other.
Marriage gives love time to deepen into forms neither person can foresee at the beginning. It asks us to keep learning how to see one another, especially when familiarity tempts us to believe that we already know everything there is to see.
A scene in the film Mr. Holland’s Opus gives the idea a more uncomfortable form. Iris tells Glenn Holland that she is pregnant, and he reacts badly. The news interrupts his plan to teach only until he can finish the symphony that will justify the compromises of his life.
Trying to recover, he tells Iris about a John Coltrane record he received as a teenager. A store clerk had assured him that he would love it. He did not. “I hated it,” Holland says. “So I played it again.” He returned to the record, over and over, until the music he had resisted became music he could not leave alone.
The analogy is imperfect and perhaps self-serving. A child is not an album one replays until it becomes agreeable. Yet Holland recognizes how little his first response may tell him. His disappointment is real. It is not necessarily prophetic. He has met a future love first as an interruption of the life he thought he wanted.
Our first reactions can tell the truth about a moment while telling us very little about who we may become, or who we should become.
Recommendation systems are very good at recording those reactions. They know whether we play, skip, or return. If I skip a song twenty times, the platform has learned something about me. If I listen to it every night for three weeks, it has learned something then too. A skip is data, but it is not necessarily discernment.
Sometimes the platform does surprise us. Streaming has introduced me to music and writers no friend or local institution would have placed in front of me. It can return a difficult song through a cover, a live recording, or an interview. Many genuine loves begin online.
It is not that a machine can never infer that repetition might change our response. It can notice patterns across millions of listeners and discover that a song rejected in one setting may succeed in another. But the system returns the song in pursuit of behavior it can recognize: another play, a longer session, a subscription retained.
My friend wanted something different. He wanted me to hear what he heard. He was willing to put the song on again before there was any evidence that I would reward the effort. A teacher may do the same with a difficult book, asking a student to return to it, not because the second reading will produce a measurable response, but because the book deserves a better judgment than the first reading allowed.
Albert Borgmann has written about the difference between technologies that deliver a good and practices that require our participation. A furnace provides warmth without asking us to chop wood or tend a flame. The warmth is real, and no sensible person should romanticize cold houses or the drudgery of keeping a fire. Yet a household with central heating no longer has to organize itself around the hearth.
Streaming may deliver Cohen to a set of young ears. But it does not deliver the kitchen, the unfinished dinner, my friend’s confidence, or the embarrassment of realizing that people I respected were hearing something I had missed.
Friends and teachers sometimes keep us immersed in things long enough for our first response to change. Much of my taste has been formed by people who loved something before I knew how to love it. They played the album again or put the book in my hand and kept asking about it, refusing to let my shrug carry more authority than it had earned.
Teaching depends on this possibility. A curriculum gives students books before the students know why those books matter. A teacher can provide context or ask for another reading after the first has produced only boredom. Such authority can become deadening or coercive. But education makes little sense if every current preference is treated as destiny.
Work can teach desire in the same backward order. Mike Rowe’s advice, earned the hard way during his stint hosting Dirty Jobs, has matured into his line: “Don’t follow your passion, but always bring it with you.” It’s useful because it reverses the usual sequence. People often take up available work, become competent, and discover that affection follows practice. This does not redeem work that degrades or exploits the worker, but it does suggest that desire need not always come first. We simply do not know what new passions might await us in the future, if only we made the necessary effort and approached whatever comes with a good will, in spite of its strangeness.
Congregations also keep old words in our mouths before we fully understand them. A Psalm may feel formal or empty. Then grief or gratitude make the same words newly resonant. The words have not changed. We have.
This is one of tradition’s gentler purposes. It preserves words and practices through periods when their value is hard to keep in view. Tradition cannot guarantee that what has been handed down is wise, and inheritance alone does not make a practice worthy of continuation. But without some patience toward what we do not yet understand, every generation is left only with the goods it can recognize immediately.
We do not choose every circumstance from which love eventually grows. Love may follow a decision or a promise. Sometimes it begins with an interruption of the life we had planned. We can grieve a love after losing it. We cannot easily grieve a love we never learned to have. Instead, we move on, tragically oblivious to the fact that it passed us by, another nameless face in the crowd.
I return to “First We Take Manhattan.” Its beat remains synthetic, its menace unresolved. The song has not become less strange, but I have become better able to hear what its strangeness is doing. So I play it again.
Nietzsche writes that, “In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fairmindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty.”
I think of the version of myself who would have skipped the song. He was not stupid. He was just early. He had not yet given the song enough time to shed its veil.
Image Credit: Pixabay
